Monthly Archives: August 2013

Appearing on Fox News after Barack Obama’s Syria speech, Saturday, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer accused the president of leaving the region hanging, and making it look like he was “chickening out.”

“This is amateur hour,” Krauthammer said, and if you were sitting in Syria, Iraq, or Moscow watching this speech, then it looked like Obama was looking for a way out of striking Syria after he had boxed himself in.

After listing the arguments in favor of going war, he noted, “the only thing that matters at this point, is the word of the United States. That overrides everything.”

“Even though I think a limited attack is not the right thing to do, at this point he has to do something, or we will have reached the lowest ebb of American influence in the region since 1970,” he said.

As for Obama’s murky timetable for action, Krauthammer said:

“They hear a president who has no idea what he is doing and speaks about this in a leisurely way. What he ought to do, (and I can’t believe he actually decided otherwise!) is bring back Congress tomorrow. We’ve got Reagan Airport, we’ve got National Airport, we’ve got Dulles….you bring in the members of congress, you have a debate for two days, and you have a resolution. You can’t leave the region hanging…It looks absolutely as if the president has chickened out. And that;s the work of the president because of the way he did this.

John Bolton found Obama’s Rose Garden speech to be “absolutely stunning.” He continued, “I’ve been trying to fill in the blank in the following sentence, ‘Barack Obama is the weakest president since….uh – and I have to say, the best I can come up with is James Buchanan who watched the country dissolve into the Civil War. ”

Let’s count the ways in which President Obama has screwed up his Syria policy.

1. He failed to take a stand in a conflict that clearly involves our interests. Bashar Assad is an ally of our enemy, Iran, and a supporter of Iran’s interests and of terrorism throughout the Middle East. He arms people who want to destroy Israel, and Israel is our friend, whose continued existence we safeguard militarily. The chance to eliminate Assad should have been seized early with a robust program of assistance to rebels before Islamists and al Qaeda had fully infiltrated their ranks.

2. Obama drew a red line without thinking. He committed to United States to action without thoroughly understanding the consequences. America must be considered true to its word or it will not be taken seriously, and national security will be severely damaged. This type of irresponsibility is what happens when you elect someone with no relevant experience for the job to be president.

Last week, Hillary Clinton used a speech to the American Bar Association to rail against states that are requiring voters show a photo ID before they vote. She called ID requirements part of “the greatest hits of voter suppression,” but she was ignoring evidence that minority turnout has gone up in states with even the toughest ID laws, even in elections where Barack Obama isn’t on the ballot.

Civil-rights activists are often of two minds on voter ID. Last year, when the NAACP hosted Attorney General Eric Holder at its annual convention, one of the requirements to cover his speech was that “all media must present government-issued photo I.D. (such as a driver’s license).” Meanwhile, NAACP president Ben Jealous introduced Holder by attacking ID laws.

“We must overwhelm the rising tide of voting suppression,” he said.

Jealous isn’t the first minority leader to say one thing while something else is done right in front of his eyes. North Dakota blooger Rob Port has a hilarious post on how several Native-American tribes require an ID to vote in tribal elections, while vehemently opposing the concept for other contests.

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In the face of Obama and company’s repeated assertions that it is a slam-dunk sure thing that the chemical weapons deployed in Syria were used by the Assad Regime, Walid Shoebat is still reporting evidence to the contrary. Earlier this week, the AP reported that intelligence officials hadn’t ruled out that the rebel fighters had deployed the weapons.

Now Associated Press reporter Dale Gavlak, is reporting that Syrian rebels, armed with chemical agents from Saudi Arabia, were responsible for the August 21st Chemical weapons attack.

As the machinery for a U.S.-led military intervention in Syria gathers pace following last week’s chemical weapons attack, the U.S. and its allies may be targeting the wrong culprit.

Interviews with people in Damascus and Ghouta, a suburb of the Syrian capital, where the humanitarian agency Doctors Without Borders said at least 355 people had died last week from what it believed to be a neurotoxic agent, appear to indicate as much.

The U.S., Britain, and France as well as the Arab League have accused the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for carrying out the chemical weapons attack, which mainly targeted civilians. U.S. warships are stationed in the Mediterranean Sea to launch military strikes against Syria in punishment for carrying out a massive chemical weapons attack. The U.S. and others are not interested in examining any contrary evidence, with U.S Secretary of State John Kerry saying Monday that Assad’s guilt was “a judgment … already clear to the world.”

However, from numerous interviews with doctors, Ghouta residents, rebel fighters and their families, a different picture emerges. Many believe that certain rebels received chemical weapons via the Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and were responsible for carrying out the dealing gas attack.

Chemical weapons from Saudi Arabia squares exactly with what we reported back on August 26th. In fact, we even posted a screen shot from a video that showed a back of chemicals from Saudi Arabia. It is from a video purported to be from a rebel location after it was secured by the Syrian government.

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Once again, the Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and we have the results for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.

“Look before you leap” – Aesop

“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” – Proverbs 16:18

This week’s winner, Joshuapundit’s Syria-Ossity is my look at the current war drums on Syria, why I think the rationale being used to drag us in is highly questionable, why it’s a stunningly bad idea, and why it’s certainly not a a place to risk American blood and treasure merely to provide our current president with a ‘wag the dog’ opportunity.Here’s a slice:

The war drums are beating again on Syria. British Prime Minister David Cameron is mouthing off about being ready to commit the downsized, miniscule Royal Navy and what’s left of the RAF to an effort to punish Syria’s Basher Assad, France’s Socialist President Hollande is making aggressive noises and our own John Kerry says that as far as he’s concerned, he’s one hundred per cent cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die certain that the recent poison gas attacks at Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus that killed a couple of hundred people are the work of Syrian dictator Basher Assad and ‘a moral obscenity’ that of course demands a military response – even though there’s no actual proof who launched the attack.

It was not so long ago that Kerry, who used to be on the Senate Foreign Relations committee was one of Assad’s chief backers and shills. He was always saying how we needed to ‘engage’ with Assad, give him aid, and show him how friendly we were by pressuring Israel to give him back the Golan Heights, the better to kill Jews with.

During the entire time when Senator Kerry was pimping for Basher Assad, Assad was a sponsor of genocidal terrorists like Hezbollah and Hamas. He gave the orders for the assassinations of numerous Lebanese politicians including Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, not to mention a lot of journalists, business people and others who simply got in the way in Lebanon, Syria and occasionally in Europe. Assad’s regime deliberately impeded UN investigative tribunals convened to investigate some of these crimes. Not only that,but after the 2006 Lebanon War, Syria, along with its ally Iran cheerfully violated UN Resolution 1701 to rearm Hezbollah and then turned Lebanon into a colony.

None of these particular ‘moral obscenities’ mattered one whit to Kerry back then. And they certainly never bothered France or the Brits.
That fact ought to raise certain suspicions in your mind when it comes to the current push to ‘punish’ Syria.

Actually, the more I find out about this gas attack, the more something smells.

On Aug. 21, the Syrian opposition announced that there had been a massive chemical attack in Ghouta which allegedly inflicted about 1,300 fatalities including hundreds of children. As in previous chemical attacks blamed on the Assad administration, the attackers claimed the attacks used Sarin nerve gas, and they flooded YouTube with videos, especially ones featuring children.But there was no conclusive evidence about the attack or the perpetrators.

Then, there were those conflicting claims at first from the insurgents about how the gas attack had been delivered. First, the gas was supposedly delivered via missiles. When EU politicians and our own local critters like John McCain started yapping about enforcing a no fly zone, all of a sudden the rebels started claiming the gas come via an aerial bombardment – except there was no evidence of shrapnel wounds that normally come with both artillery or airborne attacks of this kind. It’s also worth remembering that when news of the attacks first went public, the UN delegation and foreign diplomats were denied access to the attack site for a few days by the Syrian opposition because it ‘wasn’t safe’ for them.

We also don’t know who fired shots at the UN delegation when they were finally allowed to enter the attack site by the Assad regime. It could very well have been Assad’s men…but it could also just as easily been the insurgents.

That attack resulted in a number of former opposition leaders publicly switching sides to Assad and even going public on Syrian TV about it. While I haven’t seen the TV clips, it makes sense that after a failed attack, some of the local players would go public in switching sides to the Assad regime as it becomes seen as the strong horse.

If that’s the case, it makes no sense that Assad would gas people who just came out backing him, especially with UN inspectors already in the country.On the other hand, if the rebels had captured some of Assad’s gas weapons and decided to punish defectors in a way that would also give them a propaganda coup….and apparently the rebels do have Sarin gas themselves:

In our non-Council category, the winner was Mark Steyn with Obamacare’s Hierarchy of Privilegesubmitted by The Noisy Room. It’s Steyn’s masterful dissection of what ObamaCare has become and what it promises for the future Do read it. OK,without further ado, here are this week’s full results:

See you next week! Don’t forget to tune in on Monday AM for this week’s Watcher’s Forum, as the Council and their invited special guests take apart one of the provocative issues of the day with short takes and weigh in…don’t you dare miss it. And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us onTwitter…..’cause we’re cool like that!

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Wow, looks like our neocon warrior president couldn’t get anyone to join team al Qaeda with him.

President Obama is willing to move ahead with a limited military strike on Syria even while allies like Britain are debating whether to join the effort and without an endorsement from the United Nations Security Council, senior administration officials said Thursday.

He’s also willing to go it alone without Congressional authorization or the support (or even the knowledge) of the American public, too, so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

Syrian allies Iran and Russia are working together to prevent a Western military attack on Syria, the Iranian president said, as Russia said it is sending warships to the Mediterranean, where U.S. ships are already in position.

Don’t worry, though – Obama knows just what to do.

BREAKING: White House warns Russia to remove ships from Mediterranean, or be called racists

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Holy Cow, after Obama, his Spox, and Kerry all went out on a limb to say that there was no doubt at all about who was behind the attack, comes this latest report via Weasel Zippers:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The intelligence linking Syrian President Bashar Assad or his inner circle to an alleged chemical weapons attack is no “slam dunk,” with questions remaining about who actually controls some of Syria’s chemical weapons stores and doubts about whether Assad himself ordered the strike, U.S. intelligence officials say.

President Barack Obama declared unequivocally Wednesday that the Syrian government was responsible, while laying the groundwork for an expected U.S. military strike.

“We have concluded that the Syrian government in fact carried these out,” Obama said in an interview with “NewsHour” on PBS. “And if that’s so, then there need to be international consequences.” […]

An intercept of Syrian military officials discussing the strike was among low-level staff, with no direct evidence tying the attack back to an Assad insider or even a senior Syrian commander, the officials said.

So while Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday that links between the attack and the Assad government are “undeniable,” U.S. intelligence officials are not so certain that the suspected chemical attack was carried out on Assad’s orders, or even completely sure it was carried out by government forces, the officials said. […]

Another possibility that officials would hope to rule out: that stocks had fallen out of the government’s control and were deployed by rebels in a callous and calculated attempt to draw the West into the war.

But but but how can this be? Jay Carney said it would be “preposterous” to think otherwise!